Top "Planet Analog" articles for 2011 (Part 1 of 2)

It's customary to look back at the end of a year and see what the most popular articles were, and we are not going to ignore that custom. We are pleased to present the top design features of 2011 at Planet Analog, and we are listing them below for you with links. This way, you can see what your fellow engineers found interesting, or maybe catch up on something you missed.

Unlike consumer publications, which like to use unusual or prime numbers on the theory that this attracts more eyeballs and attention ("17 ways to say it's over";"37 ways to save money now"), we'll stick with a basic 12. We are listing top items #7 through #12 this week, and we'll do #1 through #6 next week.

A few points of which to be aware:

•If an article received a high number of page views in 2011, but was published (posted) before 2011, should we include it here? We made a judgment call and decided to stick only with those items which were first published in 2011. (There's no denying that some items published in 2010 and earlier are still going very strong.)

•Of course, articles which appeared later in the year have had less opportunity to get page views, compared to those which appeared earlier. Sometimes, life just isn’t fair.

•Finally, if an article that is part of an on-going series appeared in the top group, and some of the other series entries were near to it in rankings, we have collected them all into one "top" listing, for convenience (as you'll see next week). But we did not total up the individual scores to move that series up in the rankings: the first entry listed scored where it did on its own.

One more thing: if you are interested in seeing which features received top page views at our sibling Designline sites, go to their respective home pages and you'll see similar "top articles" entries, each with a unique introduction and perspective by the respective site editor.

Every now and then something new comes along that causes you to want to dig down and find out a little more information. Tearing my attention away from Caitlin Jenner for a moment, I thought I'd take a closer look at the remarkable Solar Impulse 2 – an airplane powered solely by solar energy.

When analog engineers get together, the discussion always turns technical with a touch of fun. Laptops open up, schematics are surveyed and discussed, good hearty laughter abounds, and fond reminiscing of analog icons no longer with us brings out old stories and some good memories.

It might seem counterintuitive that an active device solution consumes less power than a passive device. Every design engineer knows that a passive crystal resonator (XTAL) doesn’t draw power, so why use an oscillator in place of an XTAL in a power sensitive application? The answer becomes clear when total system power is considered.